The paper examines progress with the external rebalancing of euro area deficit countries. Relative prices are adjusting at different pace across countries and with different compositions of wage cuts and labor shedding. There is so far limited evidence of resource re-allocation from non-tradable...

We examine economic convergence among euro area countries on multiple dimensions. While there was nominal convergence of inflation and interest rates, real convergence of per capita income levels has not occurred among the original euro area members since the advent of the common currency....

Assessing the magnitude of the output gap is critical to achieving an optimal policy mix. Unfortunately, the gap is an unobservable variable, which, in practice, has been estimated in a variety of ways, depending on the preferences of the modeler. This model selection problem leads to a...

Slow productivity growth has plagued the euro area since the mid-1990s. That is particularly striking in view of the large productivity gains in the United States during the same period. This paper shows that the deceleration in labor productivity in the euro area was caused by structural...

This paper discusses the risks of stagnation over the medium term in the euro area. It examines the consequences of longer-term growth trends that predate the crisis and the progress made in addressing the crisis legacies of high unemployment and debt. The paper illustrates in a downside...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles played by the...

What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? Bydocumenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cyclein a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations aredriven by one major factor. The positive...

This paper examines the impact of international financial integration on macroeconomic volatility in a large group of industrial and developing economies over the period 1960-99. We report two major results: First, while the volatility of output growth has, on average, declined in the 1990s...

We compare business cycle fluctuations in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Our main results are as follows: (i) African economies stand out by their macroeconomic volatility, which is is reflected in the volatility of output and other macro variables; (ii)...